Monday, March 14, 2005

The New Republic Online : : Iraq'd

The GOP is predictably stonewalling the political aspects of the 9/11 investigation:

Last July, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 511-page report into how the intelligence community erroneously assessed Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass production programs and relationship to Al Qaeda. However, it wasn't complete. Committee members opted to defer inquiry into the politically hazardous questions of how accurately the Bush administration represented the intelligence it possessed on Iraq to the Congress and the public and how appropriately administration policymakers influenced the assessment and presentation of intelligence products within the government until after the November election.

1 Comments:

THE BACK BURNER: Last July, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 511-page report into how the intelligence community erroneously assessed Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass production programs and relationship to Al Qaeda. However, it wasn't complete. Committee members opted to defer inquiry into the politically hazardous questions of how accurately the Bush administration represented the intelligence it possessed on Iraq to the Congress and the public and how appropriately administration policymakers influenced the assessment and presentation of intelligence products within the government until after the November election. Liberals especially have been waiting with bated breath ever since.

Today, Pat Roberts, the Senate intelligence committee chairman, told everyone not to bother. "It's basically on the back burner," Roberts said after a speech on intelligence reform at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "The bottom line is that [the administration] believed the intelligence, and the intelligence was wrong." Some might dispute that characterization, as former CIA Director George Tenet did last year when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee--on which Roberts also serves--that "when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it."

Besides, Roberts added, the "WMD Commission in March will lay it all out." That would be the commission President Bush appointed last February to deflect political heat on the Iraq intelligence debacle--and which doesn't look at policymakers' role in either intelligence production or public representation. As Vice President Cheney recently told Fox News, the WMD Commission's mandate has expanded recently to provide guidance on how to implement the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which Roberts emphasized--and not without good reason--will be his oversight priority during the next congress. Iraq--already only one aspect of the commission's focus from the start--has been decreasing in priority for the secretive commission. When I asked spokesman Larry McQuillan recently whether the WMD Commission whether would provide closure on the Iraq intelligence failures, his answer wasn't encouraging: "We're going contribute to the understanding of what happened in Iraq. It's for others to decide whether that's closure." But since Roberts' decision to essentially scotch the second phase of the Senate inquiry makes the WMD Commission's forthcoming report the last official review of prewar intelligence--and with that report, McQuillan adds, "most of what is found is not going to be released to the public"--we may not have much choice in the matter.